


flowers bloom in winter

by Areiton



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Gore, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Steve Rogers, Pining, Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-08-20 05:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20222917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Areiton/pseuds/Areiton
Summary: They find flowers first.





	1. Chapter 1

They find flowers first. Later, when they test them, it’ll be announced that they're white roses, the kind that bloom big and fragrant, thorns sharp and deadly. 

They find the flowers, a thick bed of blood splattered white frozen around him, crawling over his shield and pale pale face. 

Like even frozen and forgotten and a century lost, he was still in love. 

~*~ 

The belladonna is found through the years. Blood splattered and coated in frost, they became almost a calling card, found near assassinations and killings. 

Not all the time. It took decades to put together, and attribute to the ghost know only as the Winter Solider. 

It can’t be the same assassin, is the thing. 

But years slip by and the petals never quite stop being found--a lover with his hands soaked in blood. 

~*~ 

They didn’t talk about it, back in his day. It was whispered about, sometimes, the flower cough. But it wasn’t talked about. Those who were afflicted with it vanished into seclusion. 

They either returned, pale and blank-eyed, hollowed out--or they were laid to rest quietly in the Greenwood. 

~*~ 

He coughs up a rose, during debrief, and another gets spit, bloody and waxy and white, on the street when they fight AIM’s newest threat, and he catches the looks, heavy and worried and almost afraid, but he doesn’t address it. 

After, when he looks, the rose is dirty, trampled in the dust. He lifts it, gently, and tucks it in a pocket and slips it into a drawer in his room, full of waxy blood stained white roses petals. 

~*~ 

There are belladonna flower petals, on the roof next to Steve’s apartment, and Fury’s blood on his floor. He listens to Nat tell a story, one he doesn’t know how to believe. 

“It kills people--the flower cough. It killed, in the ‘40s,” Steve says, interrupting. “It--is there a cure?” 

There’s a hint of hope in his voice and pity in her eyes. “No. But--it hasn’t killed you.” 

~*~ 

He thinks it should have. 

The way the thorns rip at him, flay him open and leave him raw--he thinks that should kill him. 

He thinks the guilt and weight of his love--he thinks that _ will. _

~*~ 

The pain is familiar is the truth of it. He thinks it should make him sick, to see the blood stained flowers, to feel the dig of thorns in his throat, and there are times--fits--when he coughs and coughs and coughs, blood and petals and thick thorns scattered around his bed while he sobs in pain and loss.   
It reminds him, some, of the long winters, when Bucky would curve around him, a heavy familiar weight holding him together when his lungs rattled and his body shook with coughs and he felt like they’d tear him in two. 

Bucky smelt, always, of spring and snow, and he lays in this fragrant bouquet of copper pennies and funeral flowers and he _ wishes _ the ice had claimed him. 

~*~ 

The man on the bridge is vicious, brutal in his attack, and it makes a spike of pain lodge in Steve’s gut, the pain a familiar ache. It slows him, just enough that the man lands a punch and Steve gags, spits bloody white and scrambles to hold back a knife headed for his face. 

It pauses. 

The man pauses. 

There is confusion in those eyes, the first emotion Steve has seen at all. 

He slams into him, hard and dirty, and it snaps the man back into the moment, into the desperate kill or be killed that makes very little sense to him. 

The mask comes off, in a spill of bloody violet petals and Bucky--Bucky. 

Oh god, _ Bucky. _

~*~ 

Confusion in storm grey eyes and the scent of spring and snow, and he can’t _ breath _through the push of petals and thorns, feels like it’s ripping apart his soul. 

“Who the hell is Bucky?” 

~*~ 

Later--after the helicarriers, after the fight and the blood and the promise that feels like a vow, after fire and flowers and fury, Nat tells him. 

She sits by his bedside, her eyes shadowed, fixed on the waxy white roses speckled with blood and the purple belladonna. 

“They found them--the belladonna--next to you. They found you in the mud and a bed of roses and belladonna.” 

Steve doesn’t answer the question in her voice, the one that begs for an answer. 

He doesn’t know how. 

~*~ 

He tucks the petals--roses and belladonna both--into his drawer, the scent of funerals and copper pennies touched with spring and snow and he lays on his bed, breathes through the spike of thorns in his throat, the petals waxy in his mouth, the ache of love in his breast. 

He waits. 


	2. Chapter 2

He steals one of them. The big white rose and it’s thick green thorns. Later, he feels guilty. The blood is tacky on his flesh fingers and the metal ones bruise the white petals and he thinks,  _ a weapon doesn’t deserve this.  _

He keeps it anyway. 

.~*~ 

He coughs up purple flowers and he studies them, curiously. They hurt, when he coughs, a deep blooming pain that is comforting somehow. The flowers tickle at his memories, tug him like the man on the bridge did. 

_ I’m your friend.  _

The flowers bloom and choke and spill and he thinks. This isn’t friendship. 

He thinks,  _ this _ is dangerous. 

~*~ 

He runs. 

There is something broken in him--broken broken shattered sharp shards weapons to cut and kill--and it  _ scares _ him, and he runs. 

Sometimes, there are people--black clad and shooting, a mom jogging in the park pulling a knife, a man in a suit with three guards cornering him--who try to take him. 

They never do. 

He leaves a trail of bodies and bloody flowers and keeps running. 

~*~ 

The Romanian woman is watching him, soft concern in ancient eyes. “Esti foarte singur,” she murmurs. His fingers, flesh and cold, brush the rose in his pocket and a petal falls from his lips. Her eyes track it. 

They’re very wide and very frightened when she says, “Iubirea ta te omoară.”

He doesn’t answer. 

He doesn’t know how. 

~*~ 

Weapons aren’t made for love. They are made for use, for hurting, for killing. 

She was wrong, the old Romanian grandmother. 

But he holds the flowers in his hand, blood stained purple, and wonders. 

~*~

Sometimes when he dreams, they are just dreams. Not the torture memories of Handlers and the Chair and the Tube and blood. 

But dreams. Of baseball and alleys and a feisty angry blonde, too much attitude for a body so tiny, of longing and want and the sometimes sharp fear of loss. 

He dreams and wakes up in bed of flowers, and aches for something he cannot name. 

~*~ 

He works. 

In construction and in fields and on roads. Places where what he was is never asked, they only value is strength for what he can build, and no one says anything about the flowers. 

He likes it. 

It reminds him of the docks, of water and salt and heavy hard work and Steve at the end of the day. 

~*~ 

Steve. 

Steve. 

Oh gods, he  _ remembers.  _

_ ~*~  _

He lives. A small, simple life--work and food and flowers and dreams--but a life, one he chose, one he is viciously happy in. One free of blood and gunsmoke and pain. 

And he remembers. Steve and the war and baseball and their tiny beds shoved together and the scent of flowers and funerals that clung to Steve. 

He remembers watching him and thinking,  _ I love you I love you I love you.  _

He remembers watching him and thinking,  _ I’m not coughing, this--this is still safe. This is allowed.  _

He remembers blinking up at him, in a cold factory in Europe, pain buzzing in his veins and healing him wrong, a monster, an  _ experiment _ but Steve--Steve was there, big and beautiful and not quite  _ right _ but always  _ his _ and Bucky coughed. 

~*~ 

He remembers Steve, bloody and broken, and begging, and  _ hurting _ him. 

He throws up flowers for hours, shaking and coughing and sobbing. 

~*~ 

He lives. 

A small, simple life--work and food and flower and dreams and memories--but a life, one he chose. 

It feels, with the memories of Steve pressing close and the scent of spring and snow in his little apartment and the waxy flower fading under his fingers, very small. 

Very far from what he  _ wants.  _

~*~ 

The Widow finds him. 

He watches her, poking into his little icebox and through his books and notes and she says, “He needs you.”

“I hurt him.” 

She turns. Patient and scared and tense and showing it only in the tightness of her eyes and lips and fingers. Natalia, little Natalia, grown up beautiful and deadly. 

“He’ll die. The flower cough--” 

Bucky shifts. Touches the wilted rose in his pocket, a handful of crumpled petals now. 

“I’ll come.” 

~*~ 

The house--

The house is small. It’s on a quiet road, as quiet as the city ever gets, a narrow brownstone with ivy crawling up the sides. There is a balcony that confuses him--poor security, beautiful sunlight, dangerous and exactly what Stevie wants he makes protecting him so  _ hard-- _ he coughs, almost absently, and a flower falls.

“He’s waiting,” she says and he needs nothing more than that. 

~*~ 

The house is lovely, with pictures on the walls, faces he can feel tugging at his memories and a faded couch, a scuffed table, a bookcase overflowing with books. 

And flowers. 

Roses, blood stained and beautiful, on every surface, filling the house with the scent of copper and funerals and he  _ aches  _ with it. 

The house is lovely. 

But it is the man--curled in a blanket on the faded couch, eyes blinking sleepily at Bucky, a familiar, beautiful smile on his lips, that makes an ache, sharp and lovely, bloom in his gut. 

Steve is waiting.

He blinks and reaches out a hand, breathes, “ _ Bucky.”  _

And Bucky steps forward, dips down, curls around him, breathes him in, clings as tight as Steve clings to him. He says, soft, “I love you.” 

I love you. 

~*~ 

He lives. A small, simple life--work and food and flower and dreams and memories and  _ love _ \--but a life, one he chose. He is happy. They are happy. 


End file.
